This has been something that has bothered me since the beginning of this pandemic back in March, at least as far as locally. Honestly, it is a bit of a sore subject for me personally, as there was a situation at my place of employment in which I refused to have myself or my staff perform a specific task that would have put us directly in harms way for several days, dealing with thousands of members of the public, and my employer brought in their doctor they "had been consulting with regarding the pandemic" to try to ease my fears.
Of course, this was no CDC doctor or anyone of that ilk mind you - just a plain ol' local family practice doctor that they had been relying on for assessments of the situation.
After I listened to the Dr.'s spiel about how this pandemic is no big deal - there are only 30 something cases in the area right now, that even if I get it, I won't die, and in a week or two there would be no cases because it is contained and this is no different than the flu (sounds familiar I'm sure) - I then took the floor and delivered this message to both he and one of our senior executives that was in the room with us that clearly was buying everything this guy had been telling them: Being a medical doctor does not make a person a social-distancing or pandemic control expert!
A family practice medical doctor is an expert at four things - 1. A thorough understanding of how the human body works, 2.) Being able to diagnose a sickness within a human's body, 3.) Telling a human how he or she may have gotten sick, and 4.) How to treat said sickness....that's it. Him trying to explain to me anything about pandemic control or the need to social distance or not is no different than him trying to explain to me how the Cover 2 defense works - that is not your field. It is something that effects your field to a very large degree, but it is not your field.
It was a very professional and polite, but obviously contentious conversation.
Granted, and I said this to him, doctors have very sharp minds, and they are fully capable of analyzing data just like any other analytics expert can or just like any other intelligent person that has decided to pay close attention to something can, and because of that sharp mind, they may be able to come up with more accurate conclusions more times than not than the average person; but unless you work for the CDC and specialize in this specific thing, having "Dr." in front of your name does not add to your credibility with assessing a pandemic spread and the need to socially distance, nor does it give you a sudden thorough understanding of how this brand new virus works, what types of surfaces it can live on, and how long it can live on it, etc. - no one had a clue back then about any of that stuff! Opinions were all over the place and still are today, but you know it all because you are local family doctor?!
I told the doctor in that meeting that there were already hundreds of examples around the globe that clearly showed to anyone that is paying attention that if you have 30 cases and your city is still open, you will soon have 200 cases, and that will soon be thousands of cases within a few short weeks. I even also told him that the task my employer is asking us to do right now will be moot in the next 10 to 14 days anyway, as we won't even have a choice in the matter because things will be shut down in a governmental-mandatory fashion; he essentially laughed at that notion in a smug manner, and after ending the conversation politely and respectfully, we went our separate ways.
I won't callously state that I was "happy" to be right, but I did take a level of satisfaction in knowing that the analysis and research I had done myself from simply paying attention and not turning a blind eye, came to fruition. And literally, in even less than the 10 days I mentioned to him in that meeting, we were all given the "work from home" mandate by the local government, and shortly thereafter, the state, and my conversation with the doctor "consultant" became moot, just as I told him it would.